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The future of journalism and new media is fun to talk about in the abstract, but things get a little hairier when we start talking about actual projects tried out at actual news organizations, especially the small, local ones that make up the vast majority of our journalistic ecosystem. So I thought it'd be helpful to survey how one small daily newspaper uses social media to engage with its community and gather and disseminate news. The easiest paper to do with is, of course, my own — The Grand Island Independent. We're a 20,000-circulation paper covering a city of 45,000 in the middle of Nebraska, along with 16 rural counties around it. I talked with Stephanie Romanski, our awesome web editor, who has spearheaded bunches of creative uses of the web and social media, including daily Cover it Live chats with readers and a personal voice for the newspaper on Twitter and Facebook. (She writes in more detail about those efforts on her blog, so make sure to check it out.) Steph and I talked last week for a half hour about those initiatives and others, along with the differences between social media at small news orgs and large ones and tons of Steph's advice for people jumping into social media at smaller outlets. Have a listen — Steph's got some great stuff to share. [podcast]http://stephanieromanski.com/Pod/SocialMediaforSmallPapers.mp3[/podcast] Download

  Posts

August 28th, 2014

This Week in Review: Twitter and press intimidation in Ferguson, and a journalist’s brutal execution

August 21st, 2014

This Week in Review: Ferguson and press freedom, and BuzzFeed’s $50 million boost

August 14th, 2014

This Week in Review: Covering war in real time, and evaluating a pair of plagiarism cases

July 31st, 2014

This Week in Review: The Fox/Time Warner dance begins, and clickbait and its discontents

July 17th, 2014

This Week in Review: Facebook and online control, and educating stronger data journalists

July 10th, 2014

This Week in Review: Questions on Facebook’s experiment, and a knockout blow to Aereo

July 2nd, 2014

This Week in Review: Time Inc. tries to survive on its own, and the global shift to mobile news

June 12th, 2014

This Week in Review: A setback for reporter privilege, and a new New York Times opinion app

June 9th, 2014

Making sense of research: Has campaign journalism changed on Twitter?

June 5th, 2014

This Week in Review: Kinsley vs. Greenwald on NSA secrets, and new data on mobile’s rise